Lion Internet Recovery enables Lion users to download and reinstall Lion from Apple's servers when they experience an operating system meltdown, as long as they have a broadband connection. The feature mimics that of Lion's built-in recovery drive that is installed on your Mac when you install Lion, but the advantage is that the computer is able to retrieve the data remotely in the event that your entire storage disk is experiencing problems. Take it from us, though: the faster and more reliable your Internet connection, the better, because this isn't a tiny download.

It was only a matter of time before the 2011 iMacs gained this feature—early 2011 MacBook Pros also gained this feature recently via their own firmware update. In addition to Lion Internet Recovery, the EFI Update 1.7 also fixes compatibility problems with Apple's Thunderbolt Display and improves performance when the machine is in Target Disk Mode.

Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui

Apple messed upHad a mac pro with leopard on it, when lion came out i said that is a OS i need, so went on to update only to find out i had to install snow leopard first. I called almost all the apple suppliers in the country (Greece) but no one had snow leopard, they told me when a new OS comes out apple stops selling the old one. So i was legally locked to my leopard and the only legal solution was to buy a new mac. Even checked amazon uk, they only had a family pack of snow leopard for about 130 pounds. Pirating was the solution. Thank you apple.

This feature is worth it's weight in gold! Take it from a geek to had to help a poor student whose netbook's HDD stopped working (taking the recovery partition with it). Ofcourse sony would sell you the recovery discs for $50... And even though we had a valid windows starter edition serial number, it would only work with the OEM version that microsoft sells to sony (which you cannot download from any source).

All the while, I was constantly reminded of Lion and its lenient policies on piracy Makes it really easy to re-install in case you have a bad hard drive. You just replace it with a new one, and off you go...

Neat feature. It's a very convenient way to reinstall the OS on a fresh drive.

However, it's 5 years too early by Canadian standards. 4 GB is not a light load on my line. I'd rather save a few hours of download, and potential overage fees, and just use the install DVD I burned.

It might be horribly inconvenient, but you can take your iMac (or MB Air/Pro) to an Apple store and they'll let you download it there.

*edit* Or if you're more technically inclined just take the bare drive perhaps? Maybe they'd let you throw it into a Pro and download using their hardware. Might be worth asking on that one first!

Why does everybody think there's an Apple store everywhere? I live in Canada and the closest one to me is 6 hours. They should have at least offered it on a DVD or USB that maybe lets people who stuck with leopard and didn't get snow leopard upgrade for $60 rather than just a USB for $60 that's an upgrade only.

Neat feature. It's a very convenient way to reinstall the OS on a fresh drive.

However, it's 5 years too early by Canadian standards. 4 GB is not a light load on my line. I'd rather save a few hours of download, and potential overage fees, and just use the install DVD I burned.

Speak for yourself, it's entirely dependent on where you live. I live in Canada and have 55Mbps download speeds so it's entirely reasonable.

This is great feature for Apple users, it reminds me of those tiny boot disks that Linux distributions can use to download and install themselves from the internet, but integrated into the firmware? Now that's easy to use.

Neat feature. It's a very convenient way to reinstall the OS on a fresh drive.

However, it's 5 years too early by Canadian standards. 4 GB is not a light load on my line. I'd rather save a few hours of download, and potential overage fees, and just use the install DVD I burned.

It might be horribly inconvenient, but you can take your iMac (or MB Air/Pro) to an Apple store and they'll let you download it there.

*edit* Or if you're more technically inclined just take the bare drive perhaps? Maybe they'd let you throw it into a Pro and download using their hardware. Might be worth asking on that one first!

Why does everybody think there's an Apple store everywhere? I live in Canada and the closest one to me is 6 hours. They should have at least offered it on a DVD or USB that maybe lets people who stuck with leopard and didn't get snow leopard upgrade for $60 rather than just a USB for $60 that's an upgrade only.

Why does everybody think there's an Apple store everywhere? I live in Canada and the closest one to me is 6 hours. They should have at least offered it on a DVD or USB that maybe lets people who stuck with leopard and didn't get snow leopard upgrade for $60 rather than just a USB for $60 that's an upgrade only.

I haven't tried the upgrade stick myself, but does anyone know if it really is only an upgrade or if it is just labeled as such by Apple? The $29 Snow Leopard upgrade disks were labeled as being upgrade versions that would only work on a Leopard system, but they would upgrade a Tiger system just fine if you popped the disk in. Has anyone tested the Lion USB sticks to see if they are similarly lenient?

So any news when apple will start using the 2.0 uefi. so windows can natively boot instead of having to mess around with boot camp.

Windows boot natively on Mac since the shift to Intel x86 arch. in 2006.Bootcamp is just a bootloader in EFI's MAC. Plus a few software utilities in OS X but theses are not necessarily needed.You can take a Win 7 DVD, boot from it, and wipe the whole disk and install it and it runs fine.

Apple messed upHad a mac pro with leopard on it, when lion came out i said that is a OS i need, so went on to update only to find out i had to install snow leopard first. I called almost all the apple suppliers in the country (Greece) but no one had snow leopard, they told me when a new OS comes out apple stops selling the old one. So i was legally locked to my leopard and the only legal solution was to buy a new mac. Even checked amazon uk, they only had a family pack of snow leopard for about 130 pounds. Pirating was the solution. Thank you apple.

It is possible to take the lion install you purchase from the app store and make it into a bootable usb drive. I did a clean reinstall that way, so I don't know why you could not have done that. There was no need to pirate. Although, if you are getting a new copy of the software that came with your hardware, you were already licensed anyway

A customer that's tired of reinstalling your stupid OS from cd's, then sitting through 5 days of re-patching hell

Microsoft does have this option, in fact it's HAD it since XP SP3 came out. And you must not know what you're doing if it takes you more than an hour to reinstall an OS.

How is the average user supposed to know this? The average user would go back to the original install disks and if those were from several releases ago and their internet connection is a DSL or slower then 5 days of patching is not unheard of for the average user who has other things to do besides babysitting his computer. Fobsquad, you must be a PC geek, but most users are not.

A customer that's tired of reinstalling your stupid OS from cd's, then sitting through 5 days of re-patching hell

Personally, I don't think recovering OS X Lion from the Internet (which, by the way, is multiple gigabytes of install files) is any easier than Microsoft's method. It's six of one, half a dozen of the other.

All the while, I was constantly reminded of Lion and its lenient policies on piracy Makes it really easy to re-install in case you have a bad hard drive. You just replace it with a new one, and off you go...

Well, technically it isn't piracy if you were a legit license holder in the first place. Windows just makes it harder to be honest.